 In the last blog, I introduced the concept of psychological safety. Researchers at Google discovered that teams that nurture spaces where team-members can be themselves, will move from simply surviving the daily uncertainties, complex interdependencies and ambiguity that our work presents to us, to thriving in them.
A few years ago, a colleague and I had the opportunity to work with and advise a senior leader who was facing many large changes within her team, from structure to strategy to systems. She modeled the following leadership characteristics: 1.Curiosity: She was open to consider new ideas and learn from others’ experiences. She surrounded herself with different groups of people (at all levels), advising her, drawing from the wealth of knowledge throughout her organization. By modeling this attitude early on, she fostered an open-door policy of ideas, feedback, reflections and early warnings, if things went a bit sideways. No-one feared this leader. 2.Lifelong Learner: She was comfortable with failing fast, or as we re-framed it: learning fast. To her, the very act of doing something outside of her comfort zone was a positive move as it signalled that she had an intention to do things differently and that this would include a learning curve, even for her. She was forgiving of herself, and those around her, as they learned fast in their commitment to the end-goal, even if there were a few missteps along the way. I remember early on, in an effort to increase this leader’s accessibility and reach across her large employee base, we tried a new communication technology. And as with new technologies, there were a number of “glitches” and the experiment was less than perfect. For some leaders this would have shut down their openness, but this leader was able to see the upside of the parts that had worked well (e.g., hearing directly from employees about issues that were bothering them) and learn from what had not (e.g., improving our technology capacities). 3.Carved out the Space: As a senior leader, she had NO extra time in her day, but she would ensure that the meetings with her network of “advisors” always had dedicated time on her agenda. Even if she missed a week or two, she would instruct her office to find the time, the space, for these important conversations. This was important to her and she advocated for this space.
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